Piggy's Palace

This week's Stranger includes a grisly story about serial murder, prostitution, police indifference, and cannibalistic bacchanals:

Port Coquitlam Councillor Darrell Penner, according to the Now, visited Piggy's Palace "a few times," believed that thousands of people had been to the place, and, though he had enjoyed some roasted pork, was certain it did not come from 953 Dominion Avenue, that is, from pigs that had been eating the women murdered on the Pickton farm.

But where else could it have come from?

It's common knowledge that Robert Pickton was, by the mid-'90s, no longer a serious commercial pig farmer. He was a wealthy man. Raising hogs now was more of a hobby. He bought the pigs, fattened them, and sold the meat to friends, or roasted them for the bikers, prostitutes, mayors, and Little Leaguers who partied at Piggy's Palace. The entire city of Port Coquitlam (pop. 53,000), it seemed, was feeding on pigs that had been fed by the suspected serial killer Robert Pickton.

And:

The plant turns animal bones, guts, fish, blood, pig entrails, used restaurant grease, and, now many believe, the remains of sex workers into a number of consumer products, like lipstick base, soaps, shampoos, and perfumes. These commodities that improve human appearance are shipped all over the world.

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Is it a coincidence that this story is posted on “Hit & Run” the day after they show “Motel Hell” on the Sci-Fi Channel. Actually, the sausage maker in “Motel Hell” leaves out the pigs (middlemen that they are)and just makes his sausage out of motel guests. Makes me glad I am a vegetarian.

For years my dad was not a big fan of pork. We never knew why, until my great aunt informed us that back during the Depression, my great-grandfather kept his pigs in a little ravine in the back forty. A drunken hobo who had come to the farm to panhandle had stumbled into the ravine and evidently had broken his neck. My dad found what was left of him the next morning when he went to slop the hogs.

STANDISH — For almost two decades, the mystique shrouding the Duvall brothers’ involvement in the disappearance of two metro Detroit hunters mushroomed like an urban legend.

The legend crashed down on top of the pair Wednesday in the 120 minutes it took jurors to find them guilty of first-degree murder in the bludgeoning deaths of Brian Ognjan of St. Clair Shores and David Tyll of Troy.

Raymond (J.R.) Duvall, 52, and Donald (Coco) Duvall, 51, now face a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for the 1985 murders on a cold, dark road near Mio.

The hunters’ disappearance 18 years ago sparked an intensive manhunt that attracted national publicity.

Dozens of lakes and rivers were searched, fields dug up, cadaver dogs called in, aerial searches conducted and ground-penetrating radar employed. No trace of the men, their belongings or their truck was found.

The investigation, spearheaded by the Michigan State Police, eventually focused on the Duvalls, two of a tightly knit clan of seven brothers known as hard-drinking, hot-tempered brawlers.

Donald and Raymond Duvall spent much of the 1980s living in trailers and small houses in the woods of northeast Lower Michigan. They cut wood and sold junk cars, supplementing their incomes with poached fish and game.

According to trial testimony, the Duvalls bragged of the murders to relatives and friends. The brothers said they fed the men’s bodies to pigs.

I once heard a story of a farmer who disposed of bodies for the mob. He’d bury them out in the cornfield. He’d then sell this same corn far and wide, including to a nationally distributed breakfast cereal company. Now I never eat corn, or breakfast cereal, or corn-containing products of any type. I stopped eating apples after my dad buried our beloved dog, Striker, at the base of our apple tree and I realized what apples were really made of. Food is Murder.

I do love PETA’s offering. Since when did animals become sensitive individuals? Somebody’s SIG has been watching too many Disney movies.

If this story is true, it would not be surprising. The police are not angels, they’re fat failures with donut addictions and power trips. They have prejudices, and (cf. Louima, et al) they invariably allow those prejudices to have an effect on the integrity of their work.